


Punctuated Equilibrium

by Able_Jack



Category: Wynonna Earp (TV)
Genre: Alternate Universe- No Supernatural, Because life is hard enough without supernatural shit, Blame this on Lucky, Canon Lesbian Character, Canon Lesbian Relationship, F/F
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-12-16
Updated: 2019-12-16
Packaged: 2021-02-25 21:06:56
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 15,561
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21821905
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Able_Jack/pseuds/Able_Jack
Summary: Waverly watches Nicole Haught tidy herself away. Cuffs rolling down, and her shirt collar closing. She flashes that dimple, and it swoops a jumping excitement into Waverly’s heartbeat.It’s been a long time since Purgatory has had something new.---The evolution of Waverly Earp, from small town girl who knows her place to something altogether different.
Relationships: Waverly Earp/Nicole Haught
Comments: 37
Kudos: 354
Collections: Best WayHaught One Shots





	Punctuated Equilibrium

The first thing Waverly tries is crying. It seems like a perfectly viable option. Almost obligatory, hanging nearly upside down in her seatbelt. Nose throbbing and tongue coated in chalky powder from the airbag. 

She heaves out two dry sobs, then stops. No need to force it. There are other things to worry about. Prime example: being trapped inside a mutilated car, after dark and below zero on a desolate road.

Before she can really get worked up, red and blue lights flash down the road.

A head pops in through her bashed out windshield. “Hi.” 

“Out,” Waverly says back, tugging at the jammed seatbelt.

“Not yet,” the deputy says. Her hair is red, and her eyes are brown. Lit up by her bazillion candlepower flashlight. It’s a ridiculous thing to notice, but she notices anyway. “We need the paramedics.”

Waverly doesn’t like it. It’s not fun to be hanging against the belt. Not much she can do about it, though. 

“The deer?” she asks. The deputy shakes her head.

“Deerly departed,” she says. Given the circumstances, Waverly almost doesn’t catch it. Then she does, and grimaces.

“That’s really awful,” she says. The adrenaline is starting to wear off. Her breaths getting tighter, and her nose pulsing with white spangles of pain. The deputy’s eyes flick across her, assessing, twisting to mutter into her shoulder mic. 

“The ambulance is close,” she reports back. “Three minutes, okay?”

“Okay,” Waverly says, the words skipping between her chattering teeth.

The deputy evaluates her again, then catches Waverly watching and turns her smile on like a switch. She has a nice smile. “Two more minutes, promise. Then we’ll get you out and you’ll get the good drugs for the broken nose.”

“Drugs,” Waverly agrees, a little gasping. Drugs will be nice.

“Next time though, keep both hands on the steering wheel. Ten and two keeps the airbag from breaking your nose.”

“The airbag broke my nose?” She makes a surprised face, and regrets it.

“The airbag hit your hand, which broke your nose. Responsible ten-and-two people get their hands blown out sideways. Casual 12 o’clockers get their hand smashed into their nose.” 

Now, yes, Waverly remembers. One hand at a very casual 12 o’clock, the other fumbling with the radio buttons. Eyes sliding over to assist. The deer unseen until too late.

The Doppler wail of an ambulance pulls up, and the crouching deputy is replaced by crawling paramedics. She’s gone by the time the neck brace is latched and they finally cut her out.

The hospital sets her nose, and gives her the good drugs. Waverly floats, thinking she should have told the deputy that there wouldn’t be a next time.

* * *

Waverly works double shifts at Shorty’s bar on the weekends, but she wakes up early on Wednesdays and Fridays to drive into the city. Stopping at the fancy grocery store, and the giant hardware store. Picking up capers and drill bits, and other one-off fancies that the denizens of Purgatory are too lazy or too practical to make a single trip over.

She charges seven bucks a trip plus cost, because demanding ten seems like too much, but five won’t cover gas and mileage. She spends the drives listening to audiobooks about entrepreneurship, and the evenings yawning through her closing shift.

She’s making it work, but making it work is a lot of work.

* * *

Waverly doesn’t go looking, but Purgatory isn’t that big of a town. She sees flashes of the red haired deputy without trying. Directing traffic around a malfunctioning traffic light. With a partner during the summer street festival. Maybe she’s even inside the patrol car Waverly sweeps past on the 2A, parked more as warning than speed trap, considering how Waverly taps her guilty brakes.

It’s like a corporeal form of The Frequency Illusion. 

Purgatory isn’t giant, either. It’s only a matter of time before they truly run into each other again. The deputy ambling easily down the sidewalk. On foot patrol, or maybe just taking a walk. Waverly in her bartender’s short skirt and low blouse, leaning on the ancient hitching post outside Shorty’s, soaking up a little stolen sun. 

“Oh,” Waverly says, startled, suddenly happy. “Hello!”

“Ma’am,” the deputy says, a polite finger on the brim of her hat as she moves past.

Waverly realizes for the first time how commonplace something as singular to Waverly as being prized from a wrecked car must be a sheriff’s deputy. She laughs something dark, yanking too hard at the taps and sloshing beer out of the pint glass she smacks down onto shitty cardboard coasters. The regulars giving her wide eyes, and puzzlingly, a little extra in the tip jar after last call.

Waverly Earp isn’t anything memorable, and she better just get used to that.

* * *

Champ breaks his leg on the rodeo circuit. The doctor tells them it’s a straightforward fracture, then he tells them it will be six weeks off his feet. 

“So much for the belt,” Champ mutters, staring at his cast. She fronts him two months rent, and gifts him a new game system as consolation for missing the rest of the circuit. People deserve to be shown love in the way they prefer, and Champ needs tangible things.

It takes all of the money she’d been keeping inside the envelope an earlier version of herself had labeled _tuition!_ in a script that flowed with excitement and hope.

“Stupid,” she tells the butterfly stamp she had put on the envelope holding her dreams. Champ deserves help, and she can save the money again. She _can_ , but people her age are graduating, and now she’s even further behind, and it feels like a door that’s starting to swing closed.

*  
Champ gets his cast off on the same day that registration for the next semester closes. She leans in the doorway, tired from her closing shift. He looks up from his game, gone nocturnal without responsibilities, and winks at her. She trails couchward to kiss him, running her hands through his hair as she watches him play.

“We should celebrate,” he hints once his game avatar dies, tapping gently at his newly freed leg. It’s comically skinny, and uncomically scaled with peeling dead skin. He’ll limp for a little while longer, but in the end, he'll be fine. She leans into his warmth, letting him pull her into his lap, happy that he’s happy. 

Purgatory had been good enough for Curtis, and for Gus. The uncle and aunt who had loved her, when her own parents hadn’t. Purgatory can be good enough for her, too.

* * *

Eventually, it comes down to circumstance, and the already established fact that Purgatory isn’t _that_ big. Playing six degrees of local separation usually taps out at three.

She meets Chrissy for their standing Wednesday coffee date, and the deputy is sitting at the table. Uniform cuffs rolled back, and collar unbuttoned. She smiles, and stands when Waverly walks up.

“Finally, we meet under better circumstances.” Her hand is out for shaking.

“You remember who I am?” Waverly hesitates, surprised.

“Waverly Earp,” the deputy says. “Known personality around town. Plus, you don’t forget your first rollover crash in a new place.” She smiles, the edge of a dimple creasing into her cheek. “I’m Nicole Haught.” They shake hands, firm but nice.

“Join us. For lunch,” Waverly blurts, looking at Chrissy too late, but her friend just nods. Deputy Haught on the other hand, frowns.

“I definitely would, but I’ve already taken my lunch break.”

They make appropriate social noises of regret, and Waverly watches Nicole Haught tidy herself away. Cuffs rolling down, and her shirt collar closing. “Next time.” She flashes that dimple, and it swoops a jumping excitement into Waverly’s heartbeat. It’s been a long time since Purgatory has had something new.

“She must be popular,” she says as the deputy strides out the door. Head up, and loping over the ground.

“Dad likes her,” Chrissy says, gathering her purse. “Lunch at the diner?”

Deputy Haught rounds a corner, and Waverly pulls herself back to the coffee shop. Chrissy is looking at her with a tiny smile creased between her brows. “What?” Waverly demands.

“Nothing,” Chrissy reassures, but her eyes say it’s one of those times she’s decided she knows a secret. Waverly huffs, but she’s never been able to make Chrissy break.

* * *

The hole in Shorty’s front window is nearly fist sized, but it’s the spidering of the glass that’s the impressive part. It almost looks like art, cracking out from the center in circles and waves.

Inside the bar, there’s a chunk of brick on the floor under the window. Cause and effect don’t take rocket surgery. Waverly sighs, and calls the Sheriff’s Department. Ten minutes later, Deputy Haught is ducking out of her cruiser, head bobbing to accommodate the brim of her regulation Stetson.

The deputy surveys the window, hip cocked and her thumbs tucked into her gun belt, the blue piping on her uniform trousers running the full length of her long legs.

“Wow. Who did you piss off?” She looks over, friendly.

“Um,” Waverly tells her, looking at how the holsters and pouches on her Sam Browne belt cover her pockets, making her hands default to gripping the oiled leather. “Oh! It wasn’t me. I don’t think. It was lawful closing time, I’m guessing. Happens a couple times a year.”

“Any cameras?”

“Please, Shorty won’t even fix that one loose tap. Security cameras aren’t happening.”

“Well,” Deputy Haught reaches up to scratch her hat along the back of her head. Waverly follows the motion, until she taps it back onto her head. “I’ll take a report since Shorty will need it for the insurance claim, but I won’t tell you there’s much hope.”

“It was probably Kyle and Pete.”

“You know that for sure?” Deputy Haught asks, sharpening.

“Yes, but no,” Waverly says, adding at the other woman’s grimace: “Small town, small bar; big reputations and bigger assumptions.”

“So I’m learning,” Deputy Haught says, something wry at the edge of her lips. “I thought the RCMP taught me how to be a good cop, but Purgatory’s keeping me humble.”

“Someone has to, right?” Waverly jokes, grinning, but the deputy shifts into a faint frown. “Um, I mean, you’re just, you look so confident and…tall.” 

Mercifully, Waverly manages to shut her mouth, awkwardness thunking between them.

“Well,” the deputy clears her throat, then grabs for something in one of her belt pouches. “I’ll file the report. Here’s my card, in case you think of anything.”

“Thank you, Deputy.” Waverly takes the card, but the holding fingers tighten. The other woman is wearing nail polish, subtly tinted blue, but you’d have to be looking hard. Waverly wonders if the tint is regulation, or a subtle buck against rules.

“My name is Nicole,” the deputy says, letting go gently. Waverly flushes, and realizes how _short_ she is, and that her hair is probably tangled, and how she’s never been cool. Not once, not ever.

“You uh, you really should come to lunch. On Wednesdays. We have coffee, and lunch. Which is why we call it lunch. And coffee. Standing invitation.”

The deputy, Nicole, looks startled, then some rapid calculation ensues that Waverly can’t follow. Head cocked just a degree to the side, eyes traveling down, then back up. 

“With the Sheriff’s daughter?” she asks, a little doubtful. Waverly feels some sort of death panic grip into her lungs.

“Oh, of course. No one want to hang out with the boss’ daughter. I—” She smiles weakly, because she doesn’t know what she is. Sorry? Ridiculous? Dying a million slow deaths?

“Unusually good company, for a Wednesday.” Nicole tries to smooth it all over. Her gaze darts away again, and her fingers tap on her belt. “I’ll come as long as I’m not called away,” she says, then tips the brim of her hat down. “Until then, ma’am.”

Waverly frowns after her. Next time she’ll remember not to be so awkward. Opportunities for new friends don’t come often. She needs to stop being so goddamn awkward.

* * *

Waverly times the boilermaker to click down just as Champ’s rump slides onto the bar stool. He smiles, golden as the first time she’d met him. Already handsome in middle school, with an athlete’s v-taper and an uncomplicated set of feelings. She’d loved him for how easy it was to be around him, and how he’d never taunted her over her last name or her missing family. How the shield of him had stopped all the others from taunting her.

“Thank you, baby. You sure know how to treat your man right.”

She kisses him quick before she spins away. Fully inside the rhythm of a bartender’s Saturday night. The men who lean over the bar, and the staccato one-two crack of the bottle tops, and the limes always perfect at her fingertips.

Maybe it isn’t a concerto, or surgery, but it’s inside her bones. She regrets it just a little when the service slows. She leans on the bar in front of Champ, six beers in and loose. His eyes drop down her cleavage as she leans. She flicks his nose. “Caveman.”

“Ooga, ooga,” he camps. “You know I can’t resist you.” 

She smiles, and lets her shirt gape a little more. It doesn’t hurt her, and it makes him happy. It’s not like when strangers indulge themselves.

“I went down to the Municipal Centre,” he tells her, “to sign up for the exam. That new deputy doesn’t really like jokes much, eh? Hope I won’t have to work with her.”

“I met her.” Waverly rubs at a spot on the bar. “She seems okay.”

“She’s a dyke, you know,” he says without malice, but Waverly flushes and glares. 

“Don’t talk about her like that.”

“What?” Champ pauses, pint glass half raised. “She is, right?” 

Waverly thinks about it. The way Nicole had looked at her, and when she’d averted her eyes. It wasn’t masculine, but it _was_ recognizable. Frame shifted, not mutated.

“It doesn’t matter, Champ. That’s an old word. Mean. Don’t use it.”

Champ shrugs, and smiles. “You’re so sweet, caring about everyone.”

She huffs, letting him cajole her out from behind the bar, up the stairs to her room, into her bed.

* * *

The deputy comes to Wednesday coffee, and Waverly starts to think of her as Nicole. She talks about being new to Purgatory, and she talks about rock climbing, and she talks about paying her dues. Her stories complement instead of overriding, and when Waverly or Chrissy talk she pays attention.

“I’ve been trying to get into the city, to get a new climbing harness, but I keep getting called in,” she says, tongue darting out against one lip; a habit Waverly has noticed.

“I can get it,” Waverly says, too fast and sudden. Both women look at her, and Waverly presses her traitorous lips shut. Wondering if humans really can be possessed by spirits.

“Waverly’s got a little concierge business going,” Chrissy fills in, pride in her voice. 

“Chrissy exaggerates. I just make some extra cash, getting things for people who’re too lazy for their own good. I’m not actually, like, serving humanity.”

“I think you’re doing just fine,” Nicole says, that smile peeping out. The one Waverly doesn’t fully understand, but sometimes thinks about on a slow shift. She clears her throat.

“I could, though. Get it for you.”

“And have you call me lazy? No way. Plus I need to test drive it before buying. I’ll just go with you.”

Something jumps in Waverly’s throat. She tries to swallow it down. Chrissy snorts, but neither woman looks at her.

“Yeah,” Waverly says. “Yeah, good.” It’s not very articulate, but it makes the satisfaction that sometimes curls inside Nicole’s smile grow.

* * *

“For you,” Nicole says, handing a key ring in the shape of a miniature Purgatory Sheriff’s Department badge across the jeep’s console. Waverly looks at it. It’s plastic, not meant to last, but it has WAVERLY etched at the bottom. A custom job, as five-year old Waverly well knows. Endlessly looking, and endlessly not finding her name in racks of name stamped books and bracelets.

“Me?”

“You,” Nicole confirms, smiling that smile. Like she’s excited to spend a couple hours with Waverly, doing nothing. Waverly takes it, and she drives, tapping her fingers on the steering wheel, missing the intermediary of Chrissy’s social graces. 

“You never said how you ended up in Purgatory,” Waverly settles on, tone interested but not probing. “It’s not exactly a hotbed of, well, anything.”

“Meth,” Nicole corrects. “And cows. Otherwise nothing.”

“So,” Waverly prompts.

“I needed a reset from the city. This place seemed like a good place,” Nicole says. Smooth, like others have asked and now she has the answer ready. “Felt kinda pulled towards it,” she adds in a different voice. This one like she’d gone into some memory that wasn’t for sharing.

“Yeah, Purgatory has a way of doing that.” Waverly glances over when the silence is a beat too long, and Nicole gives a tiny shake, coming back to herself. Shifting into a grin. 

“So, Evel Knievel. Did you buy this jeep after the crash? Because that truck must have been totaled, the way you bent the A pillar.”

“First, the deer bent the car, not me. Second, it was definitely totaled, like, so freaking hard. Third,” she hesitates, then just gets it over with. “Third, that was Gus’ truck.”

“You destroyed someone _else’s_ truck?” Nicole hoots, deliciously scandalized. 

“Worse. She made me sit in the passenger seat on all her test drives, so I’d know exactly what I’d never be allowed to drive.”

Nicole laughs, and Waverly feels it like an electric zip across her skin. Accomplishment over making someone as interesting as Nicole laugh.

They talk about Gus and Curtis and Shorty, and what it was like to be raised by a village centered around a bar. Nicole listens, and doesn’t talk about her own family, but does talk about college, and the Academy, and her old RCMP unit. The conversation unrolling like an easy road, the way it does between friends. Wending through Waverly’s muscles, loosening what had been tight.

In the city, Waverly watches Nicole pull the climbing harness up around herself. Checking the fit by sitting back into the belay line strung from the ceiling, pulling the straps high and tight on her thighs.

“Doesn’t that hurt?” Waverly asks, peering up. Nicole smirks down.

“A good harness doesn’t hurt unless you fall. Even then, it hurts men more than me.”

“Is that a good harness?” Waverly asks, on a laugh. Something deeply, and privately amused flashes across Nicole’s face.

“Worthy of the collection,” she says downward, unclipping the carabiner and shucking the harness inside out as she peels it down her thighs. Waverly’s eyes follow the action, automatic.

“Collection?” Waverly asks, but Nicole doesn’t answer, folding the tangle of straps up neatly. 

“Lunch?” she asks back, the bare rim of a dimple showing some inner amusement. Waverly just nods. 

*  
Waverly makes Nicole laugh, really laugh, three more times before she starts to feel the gravity well of Purgatory. Still ten klicks out, but growing. Burrowing under her skin exactly like a Sunday school night.

“Any plans this weekend?” she asks, hating the guttering back into small talk. Same as that middle schooler had dreaded the sun’s westward descent. The lengthening shadows then, and the lengthening pauses now, pulling her down into gloom.

Nicole shrugs. “Duty on Saturday. You?”

“Rodeo weekend,” Waverly says with poorly suppressed ennui, but Nicole looks surprised.

“Do you have a booth, or something?”

“No, I have a Champ,” Waverly says, with an eye roll indicating that Nicole knew how it went. Nicole didn’t seem to agree, because she frowned.

“Champ?”

“My boyfriend,” Waverly fills in, wondering how they’d gone a month of coffees with Nicole missing that fact. “I must have mentioned him.”

“No,” Nicole says, definitive.

“Oh.” Waverly sneaks a sideways glance to catch the other woman’s profile. She’s looking out the windscreen, face as smooth as her voice had been tight. In a novel, there would have been a tell, but real life has to fumble around without an omniscient narrator. “Well, he’s just Champ.”

“He’s a lucky guy,” Nicole says, then turns to watch the trees slide by the window. Waverly feels something stilted creep into the little vehicle.

“I didn’t realize I’d never mentioned him. Guess I dropped that ball.”

“Hey,” Nicole turns back to her, smiling. “It’s okay. You don’t owe me anything.”

“We’re friends,” Waverly contradicts. “I owe you something.”

“Friends,” Nicole agrees, snapping her head around to look out the window. “Moose,” she says softly. Waverly looks, eyes away from the road for a dangerously long time, but she doesn’t see the animal.

* * *

Two rodeo weekends later, and Nicole reappears. A long-legged form lounging against the frame of Shorty’s open front door.

“Coffee?” she asks hopefully.

“Sorry, not open.” Waverly shakes her head firmly, letting her smile make it a lie. Shorty’s has an open bar policy for sheriff’s deputies. Might could the policy would surprise the eponymous Shorty, but Waverly herself is very firm on existence and enforcement.

“Sit. Five minutes for the good stuff.” She reaches for the percolator. Nicole sits, uniform cover upside down on the bar.

“You’ve finally learned not to let the luck run out.” Waverly nods at the hat, hands busy with water and grounds.

“I’m educable,” Nicole says. The delicate skin under her eyes is smudged blue. “Sort of,” she adds, almost under her breath.

“Late night?”

“Late night, early morning,” Nicole says, eyes steady on the coffee prep. “Rookie.”

“Five years in the city, and still a rookie?” Waverly gives the mug a little spin, to put the handle on Nicole’s side.

“Way it goes,” Nicole says philosophically, blowing. Waverly watches the purse of her lips.

*  
“Food?” Nicole asks three days later. Unnoticed in the quiet pre-patron gloom until she’s already at the bar. Pathetic starvation and deep hope in every drooping line, begging from under her eyelashes.

“Give a mouse some coffee,” Waverly says darkly. Nicole’s smirk is slow from exhaustion, rolling like the long swell of an ocean comber.

“Worth a shot,” she claims, sliding onto a barstool and tapping her Stetson onto the bar top. Waverly realizes the newly unshaded left eye isn’t purple from sleep deprivation. It’s just purple.

“Nicole!” Waverly yelps, fingers flying to the arch of Nicole’s cheek, just below the bruise. “Who the fuck?” she hisses.

“Big guy, messy arrest, totally my fault.” She pulls her face from Waverly’s fingers. “And Nedley’s already read me the riot act, thanks very much. Now I’ve got six inservice sessions on remedial arrest control tactics.”

Waverly realizes viscerally, for the first time, that Nicole is a _cop._ A creature not quite the same as the rest of them. It clenches into her gut, some cocktail of pride and fear.

“Pancakes,” she says firmly, dragging Nicole by a wrist towards the diner. Nicole allows it, but backs out of reach as soon as Waverly’s distracted by locking the door, hands clasped behind her back.

“Are you done yelling at me?” she asks hopefully.

“No,” Waverly says absently, busy reminding herself for the hundredth time that Nicole doesn’t like to be touched.

Nicole sighs, and trails her down the street.

*  
“Waverly,” Nicole says, standing at her usual spot by the bar, but she doesn’t have any of the looseness of being newly off shift. She’s tight and unhappy. Pitying. 

Waverly looks down. She knows that look. “Coffee?” she asks. Hope, or habit, or just a coward’s delay.

“Waverly,” Nicole says again, softness in her eyes. “Let me take you home, okay?”

Waverly looks back at her, finding all the landmarks that have become familiar. The colour at the very edge of her lips, and the dusting of a redhead’s freckles across the bridge of her nose. She folds the bar towel carefully into quarters, already moving towards the door. Nicole lifts a hand, like maybe they’ll touch, but drops it.

Nicole allows her into the passenger side of the cruiser, and talks in gentle tones about the privilege of knowing Shorty. Waverly looks out the windscreen, and recites the names of the honourable dead. Her heart tries to include Wynonna, and she makes a noise against her teeth.

Nicole trails Waverly into the house of mourning, uniform cover snatched off as Gus pulls Waverly into a hard hug. Waverly clings back. 

“I’ll put the kettle on,” Gus eventually says, pushing Waverly back. Waverly nods. She wants more hugging, but they both know the rhythm of mourning. The visitors, and the endless weak coffee, and the casseroles. Sitting a Prairie Province shiva.

Near the door, Nicole shifts. Caught between friendship and duty, or maybe between social grace and getting the fuck out of there. Their eyes meet, and inside Waverly’s chest some stage of grief abruptly flips state and she’s sobbing. Hunched around herself, hands over her face.

She thinks, at first, that the touch wrapping around her shoulders is Nicole’s. Then the pull towards the warm body is too hard, and she knows the holder is Champ.

“Baby, baby.” He presses her head into his shoulder. “I’m here, okay? I’m here.”

She melts against him. Champ is what Waverly has. What she’s always had. She wraps her arms around the firm expanse of his ribs. In the corner of her view, Nicole slumps, then shakes herself straight. Nodding to Gus as she slides the Stetson back onto her head and stiff-arms the door.

* * *

“Time to start thinking of your legacy,” Gus tells her on a Wednesday, apropos of absolutely fucking nothing. 

“I have a legacy?” Waverly asks, leaning instead of wiping.

“Not as young as I used to be, am I? Shorty meant to leave the bar to me and Curtis, but now it’s just me.”

Waverly lets the familiar swell of grief lift her like an ocean wave. Heaving upward, and sliding away under her. It would never be easy. It wasn’t as bad as it had been. “Still not understanding the legacy,” she prompts. Gus shakes her head.

“I’m too old to keep this place myself. The opportunity comes, I’ll sell out.”

Waverly blinks too fast, watching her thumb rub against a knuckle.

“It won’t be tomorrow, girl.” Gus soothes with the same rough mercy that had met Waverly’s pediatric fevers and gory knees. “I’ll give you time to get reacquainted with that homestead.”

“I don’t like the homestead,” Waverly says. Slapping the rag ineffectually against the bar.

“I’ll go with you, the first time. The second, too, if you need it,” Gus says. Waverly huffs, and knows she’s already submitted.

* * *

Gus does go with her the first time. To help pull the dust sheets off the furniture, and take a survey.

“Pretty much terrible,” Waverly mutters, looking around a child’s bedroom. An antique bed frame looming in the corner, squatting under a cascading water stain on the wallpaper. Nightmarish and questionable like some post-apocalyptic version of Little Nemo’s Slumberland. 

Back down on the main floor, Gus finds the door jamb marked with the growth spurts of two little girls. Waverly thinks of the dead, and this time she doesn’t fight the whisper of Wynonna’s name.

Purgatory isn’t kind to those who try to live inside fantasy.

They sit at the listing dining room table and make a list of first-order tasks. Gus writes ‘electrician’ at the top of the page, but Waverly yanks the paper away, and squashes ‘exterminator’ above Gus’ angular print. Gus laughs, but Waverly thinks of a catch.

“Traditionally,” she starts, worrying half-moons into the wood of the pencil. “Traditionally, tradespeople want money in exchange for their services.” Which must be a cue because Gus slides a cheque across the table like she’s been waiting.

“Part two of your legacy.” Gus taps the paper, right over the total box.

“What is this?” Waverly’s vocal cords are tight from the number of significant zeros.

“Part two,” Gus says patiently, “of your legacy. So you can fix this place up. Get the electrician _and_ the exterminator. Make it a home. Once it’s done you’ll either have a house to live in, or nest egg to sell.”

Waverly swallows, and swallows again, something hot swelling behind her eyes.

“No guff,” Gus warns. “I’m not your mama, but you’re still my kid. Right?”

Waverly flings herself forward, throttling Gus in her chair. Squeezing until Gus reaches capacity and peels her off. Waverly lets herself be removed, distracted by the prospect of a new project. She’s going to need some spreadsheets. Maybe even a graph or two. Plus Champ’s truck, which probably necessitates Champ himself.

“That cop sure seems eager to help, the way she’s been hanging around,” Gus suggests, maybe reading her mind. Waverly looks back at her, puzzled. Gus makes the skeptical face she reserved for when Waverly maybe hadn’t been lying, but maybe hadn’t been really telling the truth either.

“What?” she asks, lost.

Gus rolls her eyes heavenward, like she’s asking for help.

* * *

At first, for just a second, Waverly assumes the person walking through the empty pre-customer bar is Nicole. Just like always. Except that it’s Champ. Flowers in his hand and the unmistakable glow of being recently showered ruddy on his skin.

She kisses him on the cheek, but pulls back sharply. Faintly, under the tang of his soap, Champ is off-gassing the scent of nerves, and someone’s strawberry body glitter.

*  
“Waverly,” Nicole says easily, eyes roving around the scene behind and beyond their little tableau.

“Shit!” Lonnie yelps beside her, hunching down and scrambling for the snap down on his holster. 

Waverly points the over/under shotgun a little higher at the ceiling, and Nicole puts her hand over Lonnie’s holster. “Maybe tell us what’s going on?” she suggests to the room at large. 

“The proprietor reserves the right to refuse service,” Waverly states very calmly. On his barstool, Champ makes a whining sort of noise.

“Put the gun down, Waverly.” Nicole commands. Waverly squints at her suspiciously, but puts the shotgun on the bar. Champ slumps down until his forehead is pressed into the bar top.

“Thank fuck,” he whispers.

“Be quiet, Mr. Hardy,” Nicole says, making Champ huff.

“Mr. Hardy,” Waverly jumps to get her side of the truth out first, “has been sampling the local delicacies. Then he decided to come here, and expected business as usual.” 

Nicole very obviously looks at the bouquet resting forlornly on the bar. Then back to Champ. Then over to Waverly.

“Hm,” she grunts, curmudgeonly. “Come on Mr. Hardy. I think it’s time to leave.” 

“That’s what I was trying to do!” Champ whips around on his stool, offended as a misaccused child. “Except for how she went nuts, and pulled a gun on me.”

“And here comes the cavalry, to rescue you.” Nicole shoves a hand into his armpit to encourage him upward. Passing him to Lonnie, who puts a hand on his shoulder. 

“We’re done, Champ,” Waverly tells him.

“Yeah, yeah,” Champ mumbles, passive under the hand leading him out. Nicole narrows her eyes at him, but turns back to Waverly. 

“Give me that shotgun, please,” she says.

Waverly feels the indignation rise up, but Nicole’s face goes remote. Showing a lot of Deputy Haught, and not much Nicole behind her eyes. Waverly feels a tiny, foreboding jab of impending humiliation.

She hands the shotgun over.

“We’re going to talk about this,” Nicole says, and she _is_ Nicole again, and that impending humiliation is hurtling bigger and closer. Waverly nods miserably.

*  
When push really comes to shove, Waverly isn’t above running away. Why confront today what can be fled from until tomorrow? 

A good plan, save for the previously brooded upon smallness of Purgatory, and the willingness of Gus to share confidential information. That ruins it.

The crunching of footsteps on gravel is the only warning, before Nicole is plonking down next to her on the park bench. Itself plonked down inside a box canyon parking lot, facing the trash cans. The reason is a lost history that felt grandly poetic just thirty seconds ago, and now just feels stupid. 

Waverly looks at her feet.

“Hey there,” Nicole greets. “Of all the awkwardly placed benches, in all the world, eh?”

“Gus is a rat fink,” Waverly informs the ground, rigid. Feeling more than seeing Nicole nod.

“I’m appropriately embarrassed, okay, so you don’t need to lecture me.” She watches her foot scuff against the gravel, like a kid at the principal’s office. 

“No lecture. I came to see if you were okay,” is all Nicole says. “You had a tough day.”

“You can’t just take my gun,” Waverly tells her, because God forbid an Earp be anything besides emotionally stilted.

“Waverly,” Nicole is fondly chiding. “I have a legal right and obligation to take the gun you threatened another human being with. You’re lucky I didn’t arrest you.”

“Well, why didn’t you?” Waverly snaps, also not above killing the messenger.

“Because I’m a terrible cop.” Waverly can feel Nicole cutting her eyes over, waiting for the just-so moment to pop that self-deprecating dimple. It’s simply that she’s far too busy boring a hole to China using the not-crying power of her eyeballs to actually look.

“Yeah,” Nicole sighs, standing up. “Okay. Come on. Let’s go process somewhere warmer, with more food.” She eyes the bins. “Or at the very least, less stink.”

Nicole’s house is open concept, with a tidy kitchen she uses to makes them popcorn in big bowls. One filled with butter and parmesan cheese, the second filled with olive oil and nutritional yeast.

“Here’s to us, and not to them,” Nicole says soberly, clinking her bowl against Waverly’s. Waverly pokes a kernel, sprinkled with yeasty goodness that definitely didn’t come from the AG Foods over on 20th.

“You went to the city?”

“Work. Not as fun without you, but at least I had a chance to get some vegan stuff,” Nicole says casually, crunching her treat. “Eat your carbs. They’ll make you feel better.”

Waverly eats a handful of carbs. Champ had never gotten her vegan yeast sprinkles, but once upon a time he _had_ chosen her. Pulled her into his orbit, and given her the title of Champ’s girlfriend, instead of tragic orphan and abandoned sibling. He’d told her she was smart, and pretty, and he’d never used his height to loom over her or his strength to hurt her. 

It was true that he didn’t much understand her passion for history and language, but he’d always listened to her ramblings, and honestly she’d never demanded more.

“Champ loves me, you know,” she finds herself saying, watching her finger stir through the bowl. “I mean, he’s vain, immature, and unfaithful, but inside the bounds of all that, he loves me. Maybe that should mean something.”

“Maybe,” Nicole says, cautious. “Just don’t make the mistake of thinking Champ is the only person who could love you.”

Waverly shovels the popcorn into her mouth. If carbs can make her feel better, then they can also make her brave. She chews, and swallows, and spits it out. “Is it easier, with women?”

“No,” Nicole says, after a thoughtful pause. “It’s just a different kind of hard.”

“You do know there’s a pretty obvious joke in there, right?” Waverly looks over, sardonic. Nicole laughs, eyes dancing they way people’s do when they are surprised by wit. It feels just as much an accomplishment as ever.

“Thanks,” Waverly says, after her own little pause. “For…just for everything.”

“Anytime.” Nicole filches a handful of Waverly’s popcorn, grinning unrepentant.

“Does this mean I can have my gun back?”

“Don’t press your luck,” is all Nicole says. Waverly grumbles into her bowl, but Nicole pokes it until Waverly looks up.

“Choose Champ if that’s what you truly want, Waves. Just don’t settle, okay? You’re too special to settle.”

Waverly swallows, and nods.

*  
Champ comes back to the bar after his customary five day habitation of the dog house, but Waverly presses her lips into a line and shakes her head.

“Well, I’ll be sheep dipped.” Gus’ voice makes Waverly spin from Champ’s philosophical shrug and retreating back. “Never thought I’d live to see the day.”

Waverly shrugs, mumbling “time.” It makes something crinkle into Gus’ eyes. Pride, maybe. Perhaps even love. Gus has never been one for extra words, and Waverly’s never been able to fully calibrate the look. “You’re on your way now, kid,” is all she says this time, snapping a dish towel at her rump. “Now get back to work. God didn’t mean for your hands to be idle while you’re figuring it all out.”

“There isn’t any god,” Waverly grouses, and Gus smiles with a rare indulgence.

* * *

It's three hours past the witches when Waverly bangs the back door open, and sees a tall figure hovering near the trash bins she's aiming at. It tightens her skin onto her bones. The ancient veld in her DNA, and short stature in her sympathetic neurons.

Recognition comes the same instant flight thrills into her fast twitch muscles. “Nicole!” Her voice is sharp from the fear, and it freezes Nicole. “What the hell?”

“Sorry,” Nicole mumbles, feet shuffling, head twisting towards escape. “Sorry. I didn’t think this through.”

“Are you okay?”

“Fine,” Nicole says, twitchy and lying badly. “I was just gonna,” she half hooks a thumb over her shoulder before Waverly’s level of glare fully kicks in, slumping her down. “Yeah. Okay.” 

“C’mon,” Waverly tells her. Then: “No,” when Nicole tries to detour to a table. Herding her upstairs to the apartment above. She ends up hovering in the middle of the small space, rocking on her feet and looking around while Waverly pours bourbon into two mugs.

“Chair.” She points to the white rocking chair. Nicole leans a little back towards the door. “Sit,” Waverly tells her, “down.”

“How did you get so scary all of a sudden?” Nicole asks, tetchy. Waverly points a little more emphatically. Nicole sighs, and sits.

“Drink,” Waverly commands, letting Nicole grimace at the burn. “One more if you want, then talk.”

Nicole looks down into her mug, neither sipping nor talking. Waverly lets the silence stretch, lets Nicole stare dry and hollow into her mug. “Nicole,” she finally says when it’s obvious Nicole is ebbing further away, serious in a way their friendship hasn’t needed yet. “Please.”

Nicole shudders, hard and abrupt. “Sometimes you see things, and they stick. That’s all. I’ll be okay.”

“Nicole,” Waverly says again. “Something made you come here. I mean, you got all vaporish and hid behind the trash bins, but you started out with the intent to come here.”

Nicole breaths hard, squeezing the mug between her palms to stop the shaking.

“You can tell me,” Waverly says, and Nicole peers at her, almost suspicious. Evidence of those people who had prized at her professional scabs. Excitement and voyeurism in their eyes, asking for the worst thing she’s ever experienced.

“It’s okay,” she puts the opposite of those people into her voice. “We can just sit, if that’s what you need, but it’s okay to tell me. Everyone deserves help with the heavier parts.” 

Nicole looks away, because some things need the pretense of isolation. “These aren’t nice things.” A token protest, which Waverly just snorts away. Nicole taps a finger on her mug, looks around the room, takes a breath.

"The very worst thing used to be this dog. Abandoned in a shut up home. The way his fur had sloughed, and you could see all his ribs. He died in the front hall, nose towards the door, still waiting for his people to come home.”

“And now,” Waverly prompts as gentle as she knows how. 

“Back bedroom. Kid. Three, maybe four. He was still holding his G.I. Joe doll. I made them zip him into the bag with it.”

There is absolutely nothing to say to that. Waverly doesn’t even try. Wishing Nicole would find a touch comforting.

“I’m not damaged,” is what Nicole finally says, looking up. “I don’t have PTSD, or anything like that.”

“I know.”

“I think,” Nicole says slowly, the way people draw out what will bring judgement down on them. Looking at Waverly carefully, and finally saying what she’d come for. “It’s just that I think some people put themselves so far outside society, that protect and serve no longer applies to them.” Nicole’s eyes search across Waverly’s face, waiting.

“Maybe,” Waverly agrees casually, sipping her own bourbon. Nicole relaxes into her chair, and that feels just as much an accomplishment as her laughter.

* * *

Nicole takes her climbing. Borrowed harness cinched down to its limits, borrowed shoes declared too big, though they feel fine. Apparently the best fit for rock climbing shoes is just shy of fully cutting off circulation.

“This is just to practice,” Nicole says. “To see if you like it.” She’s tying some belay knot onto Waverly’s harness. Doing it backwards from her own perspective. The easy skill twisting into the line, and into Waverly’s admiration.

Being around Nicole feels easy. In a way Waverly’s only felt with one other person, and she’s not coming back. Time to understand that.

“Don’t let me fall,” she says, one doubtful foot lifted onto the wall, head twisted to look back. 

“Never,” Nicole tells her, smiling softly and setting her body to absorb whatever wild energy Waverly’s inexperience might send her way.

* * *

“Party,” Nicole tells Waverly the instant she hustles into the kitchen, beckoned by an SOS text. 

“What?” Waverly asks, drawn up short and clearly behind the curve. 

“Command charity dinner,” Nicole adds flatly. “Black tie. Plus ones. Two weeks from now. Panic.”

“Panic?” Waverly looks at the lounge of Nicole’s body, leaning back against the counter, arms and ankles crossed. But it all morphs even as it is scrutinized, tiny facial muscles giving up the façade. Nicole, peering out from behind some sort of primal state.

“Panic.”

“Okay,” Waverly laughs at her. “I’ll help. We’ve got this. What’s in the closet?”

“Uniforms,” Nicole says, a ragged sort of calm.

“Yeah,” Waverly agrees. “Tonight, we’ll get drunk. Tomorrow, the city.”

“Fuck,” Nicole says on a sigh.

*  
“Alright, this one’s next.” Waverly hands another dress over to her visibly drooping companion. 

“Can we just buy the purple one? The purple one was okay.”

“Darling,” Waverly tells her, “sweetheart, dear one. The purple dress was—and I cannot possibly over emphasize this in any way—awful.”

“The purple dress is a dress and makes me decent in public. We can buy it, and then we can have lunch.”

Nicole knows Waverly is a sucker for lunch. And breakfast and dinner. But Waverly in turn knows some activities trump even food breaks. She shakes the black sheath at Nicole, who sighs and slings it over her shoulder. Trudging towards the changing room, eyes drifting starboard as she passes the suits. 

There’s something aching in the look. Something that’s both attraction and repulsion, and Waverly’s been polite about whatever processing Nicole needs to struggle through. At this point though, with lunch being so massively delayed and the reserve of dresses running critically low, frontal assault feels like the only remaining option. 

She collects the tuxedo pants and the dove grey shirt she’d hunted during previous try-ons. Nicole, looking curvy and unhappy in the black sheath, tenses when Waverly holds them out.

“Even Purgatory’s used to the idea of women in pantaloons,” Waverly tells her a little waspishly. Hungry and not afraid to show it.

“Even at formal balls, attended by three different levels of bosses?” There’s more fear in the question then Nicole probably meant, so Waverly just smiles. 

“Looking as good as you’re going to look is never an unfavourable thing, even at formal balls attended by three different levels of bosses.”

As predicted, Nicole does look good. It’s mostly the grin. The length of her legs in the snug black trousers, and the fastening stud of the Mandarin collar in the hollow of her throat don’t hurt much, either. The deeply masculine history of the look undercutting like a bank, making the femininity of her beauty blaze out like a lucifer. The contradiction that should exist, and doesn’t, which becomes the contradiction that pulls Waverly in, and in, and in.

“Yeah,” she says, a little dry in the throat. She’ll never be that tall, or that beautiful. “Yeah, we’re getting that one.”

Lunch, in comparison to that grin, pales only slightly. At least while ordering. Then being ravenous kicks in, and it gets ugly in a way that make Nicole keep her fingers back.

“Do you feel better?” Nicole asks her once the initial moment has passed, fond and maybe horrified.

“Hey.” Waverly points her fork, threatening. “Don’t push it.”

“Oh, no ma’am,” Nicole teases. Easy, and smooth, and heating straight into Waverly’s cheeks. Outclassed and flustered. By Nicole, and by that Wednesday and Friday barista in the city who’s started winking and pulling espresso before Waverly can even open her mouth, and that long ago girl on the opposing team’s cheer squad who’d helped fix the hair ribbons Stephanie Jones had yanked askew.

“Exactly,” Waverly says, like she’s won the round, covering for her complete inability to be even remotely cool. It must work, because Nicole just rolls her eyes.

“Hey,” her friend breaks the next little silence, twisting her water glass inside its little puddle of condensate. “I was wondering if you wanted to go to the Command dinner? Chrissy will be there. It could be fun.”

“Oh, um.” Waverly thinks of the still recovering _tuition!_ envelope. “Is it expensive?”

“It’s free.” Nicole waves her off. “Sheriff’s department each got two tickets. You’re my only friend outside of work. You either take it off my hands, or I’ll end up taking Lonnie.”

“Doesn’t Lonnie have his own tickets?” Waverly asks, puzzled.

“Exactly,” Nicole says, deadpan.

“In that case,” Waverly tells her, giving into something she hadn’t even really tried to fight.

*  
“Who are all these people,” Waverly asks in mystification. The charity venue is swirling with what feels like the full numerical population of Purgatory, but without many recognizable faces.

“Ha!” Nicole pounces, launching into a hand waving rendition of org charts—complete with detailed explanation of how Purgatory ended up with a Sheriff’s department, said Sheriff’s department’s Byzantium legal threads binding it to cousins-in-arms at Calgary’s RCMP headquarters, and the annual requirement to renew the font of cheerfully antagonistic _esprit de corps_ —so excruciatingly boring that even the history buff inside Waverly flickers down to coals in stupefaction.

“Crazy, right?” Nicole finally says, glowing. Waverly nods vigorously. White lies don’t count.

“So, but, why no uniforms?” she asks, before she can stop her traitorous tongue. Not quite as stupefied as the rest. Nicole narrows her eyes, thwarted from the regalia of her Class A.

“Because Sheriff looks like a sausage, stuffed into the one hanging in his closet. A cheap, vain sausage, who won’t buy a new set.”

“Deputy!” Chrissy Nedley’s voice snaps with scandal, snuck up from a blindspot and locking Nicole into a prey freeze so rock solid Waverly would swear she can see Nicole’s heart stutter, and re-start. The way it surges at the hollow under her jaw.

“He’s not behind you,” Waverly takes mercy, making Chrissy flash a look of irritated betrayal. Nicole goes limp, eyes closed as she breathes.

“Killjoy,” Chrissy accuses. Nicole pivots, stiff, on one heel.

“Nedley Junior,” she accuses right back.

“You set it up so perfect. How could I resist?” Chrissy flicks a lapel in admiration. “You clean up nice.”

“Waverly helped me.” Nicole thaws a little. 

“Uh huh.” Chrissy glances over, and Waverly glowers back into that still unfathomable knowing, but Chrissy only snorts and grabs for her wrist. 

“Welcome to the party,” she says, pulling towards the bar. “You’re going to want a drink. Trust me. This is my seventh annual Charity Function, and drinking will help with the boredom and with the handsy old men.”

“Handsy?” Nicole asks, brow wrinkling down. Chrissy shrugs. 

“Look around. This place is jam packed with old retired guys. Big ears, mucho nose hair, social progression that stopped around Trudeau the first. Getting patted on the butt is pretty much a right of passage for wives and girlfriends.”

Nicole draws up narrow, but Waverly cuts across her, interested. “How does the drinking help? Because I could use that kind of magic at Shorty’s.”

“Oh,” Chrissy grins, “it doesn’t. It just sounded good.”

Waverly takes a healthy sip of the whiskey sour the bartender hands her, nodding.

“Wait,” Nicole tries, still suspicious of old men, but Chrissy leans over and busses her on the cheek. Waverly notices that she’s eye to eye with Nicole, standing in her heels. Nicole huffs, but doesn’t move away.

“Take your manly Heineken, and go mingle, Deputy,” Chrissy tells her. Nicole narrows her eyes against the duty, but goes bravely forth after an authoritative pull of her finely imported beer.

“I’ll be back. Don’t shoot anyone,” she calls behind her. Waverly clears her throat under Chrissy’s raised eyebrow. 

“Champ and I had a small, uh, breakup. At shotgun point. Which Nicole saw. At the bar.”

“Oh, I bet that made her day.” Chrissy bites a lip. Trying, but not very hard, against her smile.

“She stole my gun,” Waverly says mournfully. Chrissy’s laugh is bright and surprised, but it doesn’t twist into her with pride and excitement like Nicole’s does.

It does twist with shame, though. Chrissy is her oldest friend. Quietly valiant even in the face of Stephanie Jones and her It Girls, before Champ had earned Waverly a seat at the lunch table. She doesn’t deserve to be pushed back just because Nicole is new and shiny.

“Come on,” Waverly says, trying for better. “Let's see what we can see.”

Mostly what they see is any work party. Tight clumps of deputies and constables, with spouses circling the outside. Grimacing at each other, and wondering if chewing off a leg would actually allow escape.

Eventually Sheriff Nedley steals Chrissy, and Waverly wanders to the balcony to look down at the groups. Mostly tuxes in the centers, with wives and girlfriends making the bright edges. Nicole’s world is only twenty percent women, dropping to twelve percent in the senior ranks. The slowly swirling kaleidoscope below is one of the millions of micro fronts in the cold gender war, and Waverly watches it between sips of whiskey sour.

Nicole is easy to track, a bright pop of red hair against the drabber upper plumage. She’s smiling, reaching to prod Lonnie in the arm, and to squeeze the shoulder of an unknown constable, and throwing her head back at the joke of a wife who clasps her upper arm. 

Waverly cajoles the not very reluctant bartender into giving her whiskey without the sour, and the evening goes a little softer. It’s nice to watch Nicole share herself with the world, and it’s nice to know that for all her grace in the social melee below, Waverly is the one who Nicole trusts with her full self. The darker stories, and the times that aren’t about laughing. 

Waverly, and Chrissy of course.

Waverly is on her third whiskey by the time Nicole makes it to the balcony. Mimicking Waverly’s lean on the front rail, forearms propped and looking into the crowd, their shoulders almost brushing.

“This is pretty much the peak.” Nicole jerks her chin out over the crowd. “From here it just gets increasingly schnozzled, and smart people start doing dumb things.”

“You want to leave?” Waverly asks, and Nicole makes an affirmative hum.

“Wouldn’t be opposed, if you’ve had enough.”

As answer, Waverly pulls her clutch around to get the jeep keys, but Nicole taps the back of her emerging hand. “Let me.”

Waverly feels it as a cold burn, zipping through vital things. Nicole had switched to soda and lime after a second beer. Maybe because she preferred it, or maybe because she’d wanted Waverly to have the freedom of the evening. But Purgatory likes to talk, and Purgatory believes the iniquity of the father passes mostly to the daughters. 

Waverly looks, but she can’t find any motive in Nicole’s regard. 

She drops the keys into the hand cupped below her own.

Now they’re rolling through the night, quiet inside the bubble of Nicole’s easy competence. One hand loose on the shifter, the other tapping the radio’s rhythm into the steering wheel. There’s just enough moonlight for Waverly to see the tendon at the back of her wrist flexing, before it disappears under the cuff of her sleeve.

“Thank you for inviting me,” Waverly says on Nicole’s front porch, and the warmth in her blood sings. Good wine, and merry company. She presses up onto her tiptoes, kissing Nicole’s cheek. She jerks once, tiny, and then she’s still under the balancing hand Waverly had curled around her bicep. “I had a great time.”

“Me too,” Nicole murmurs, and for a heartbeat there’s something wide open on her face. Some yearning thing that leans subtly towards Waverly before she shutters it back away. “Good night, Waverly Earp.”

Waverly waits until Nicole’s closed the door and turned on a light, before driving away. Her headlights sweeping down the long and empty prairie road.

* * *

It takes Waverly almost a month to realize that Nicole is suddenly hard to find. 

It’s not a physical thing. She’s there for Wednesday’s coffee and lunch, always sitting with Chrissy at the coffee shop by the time Waverly arrives. Grinning amicably at whatever nonsense comes across the little table, earning laughs with judiciously redacted tales of Purgatory’s citizenry.

It’s a proximity thing. Nicole’s smiles no longer creep into her eyes. She listens and nods, but no longer leans close for any confidences. Waverly rides into the city alone, and notices her podcasts no longer have any savor.

She spends a full morning laying between soft sheets, and wonders why. 

There’s a version of her, born under her daddy’s belt, who knows that Waverly Earp is the last and least of the universe. And there’s a version of her, born the first time Curtis’ hands guided her own through some gardening task, who knows Waverly Earp can be first in someone’s regard. And then there’s a version, born in her bed this morning, who just needs to know why.

She gets out of bed, full of the gravitational lensing of herself. So brimmed with pondering that finding Nicole on the park bench feels like perfectly orchestrated happenstance.

“Hey.” Nicole smiles, holding a carefully cut triangle of sandwich. Because Nicole is triangles not rectangles, and Nicole is lunch on park benches on sunny days, and how can Waverly be close enough to know these things and still be the one held in the farthest covalence of Nicole’s affection?

“Hey.” She sits, hands in her lap, idly swinging a foot. Nicole studies the side of her face, and nudges the sole of her shoe into Waverly’s. “Okay?”

“Okay,” she agrees, watching her thumb rub against a knuckle. Nicole hums her doubt, and Waverly sighs. Feeling a recklessness that probably isn’t courage swell through her. “I’m going to the city, this weekend. Want to ride along, go climbing on the way home? Or maybe dinner?”

“Um,” Nicole says, very much like a person with a free weekend and no ready excuse. “No, sorry. I can’t.” She doesn’t offer more, and Waverly nods. 

In the ocean there are fish that live at such depths, bringing them to the surface makes their buoyancy bladders swell out their mouths. The pressure of the words in Waverly's throat feels like freshly sharpened sympathy.

“I’ve been wondering if I did something wrong.” She doesn’t look over. She doesn’t need sight to know that Nicole’s brows pinch down when she’s confused.

“Wrong?”

“I’ve been assuming you were busy, but then I realized that it’s me. That you’ve been avoiding me. Avoiding being alone with me. So I wondered if I’ve done something wrong.” Waverly takes shallow breaths. Well and truly past the point of no return.

“Oh,” Nicole says, staring at the triangle of sandwich in her lap.

“If you tell me, maybe I can apologize.” Waverly glances sideways, daring greatly. “And maybe, if you forgive me, we can go back to being friends.”

“Friends,” Nicole snorts, hollow and bitter as the winter wind. Waverly shrugs. She wants to say _I miss you,_ but that’s maybe a little dramatic. Edging towards the aching passions of those middle school friendships that she’d been advised to mature beyond. 

“I thought we were friends,” she tries, and it comes out small. Nicole laughs, an unhappy bark that makes them both wince.

“Please,” Waverly says. “Won’t you let me try and fix whatever it is?” There is something sharp happening inside her sinuses, and it’s going to break soon, and maybe she’d better just leave.

“I’m gay,” Nicole says suddenly, looking rigidly forward, fist clenching. 

“I know,” Waverly says, confused. Flashing back to Champ, and his ugly world. “D- Do you think I care?” She quickens at a new possibility. “Wait, did someone say something to you? Something bad? Because I will kill them.” But Nicole shakes her head hard.

“No. I mean I’m _gay._ The full monty. I like women. I fall in love with women. I want to have sex with women. It’s not something I can turn off, just because…” she stops, crumpling into defeat. “I’m trying my best not to hurt anybody.”

“What?” Waverly says. Not because she doesn’t understand what Nicole is implying. It’s because she has never, and will never be anything besides Waverly Earp. Meant for Purgatory, and meant for Champ, and all the other humble things.

Nicole is not a humble thing. Nicole, who is turning to look at her fully. Sad, but trying to smile.

“It’s okay, Waverly. You didn’t do anything wrong. I just, I got the boundaries a little wrong, and I needed, _need_ , some time to get myself reset. It happens, but it’s not anyone’s fault. It’s just one of those things. Okay?”

Waverly still can’t say anything. She presses the heel of her hand hard against her cheek. Her skin feels hot, fevered and glowing.

“Okay?” Nicole asks again, uncertain. Holding steady, but Waverly can’t find any words, and she watches something inside Nicole reach bingo fuel.

“I—” she says, throat working as she looks at the martyred remains of her squashed sandwich. “I see. I’ll go. I apologize for making you uncomfortable,” she says, formal and stiff. Striding off across the parking lot, head up and shoulders square.

*  
Waverly’s back in bed, sifting through thoughts she’s spent most of a lifetime skirting around. Too complicated, too scary, just too big. Thoughts Champ made unnecessary to really ponder.

Thoughts about Nicole. And the city girl who’s been winking at her. And that long ago cheerleader. And the books she’d stolen from the Purgatory town library, once, a long time ago. One of Waverly Earp’s few premeditated sins.

She wears at them like a rock tumbler. Smoothing the most frightening edges away. Leaving only the overwhelming facts. 

*  
One: it’s possible to hide things even from yourself.

Two: the person Nicole is trying to avoid hurting is Nicole herself.

*  
Waverly goes to the Municipal Centre. Marching past the double doors to find her quarry conveniently staffing the front desk. She looks sulkily bored, poking at some form in triplicate when she looks up. Eyes going wide and head darting toward escape before she remembers she’s an adult who’s also a police officer. Sworn to bravery. Waverly watches it all snap across her face.

“Good afternoon, Waverly,” she says, cautious. Waverly gathers ever ounce of her five feet, four inches, and looms across the counter. Nicole flinches back.

“You dick,” Waverly begins. “You don’t get to just leave.”

“You seemed, you seemed uncomfortable. I didn’t—”

“Shut up,” Waverly suggests. Nicole’s teeth click shut, something stubborn just starting to rise in her face, but Waverly has no time for Nicole’s opinions. “You don’t get to decide what I am. You don’t get to just decide that you know, when I barely know myself.” 

Dawning contrition replaces the mulish bunch in Nicole’s jaw. “Hey,” she says softly, but Waverly isn’t done yet.

“We’re going on a date. You,” she clarifies, “and me. Romantic. Not friends. Not _just_ friends. What day are you free?”

Nicole stares, but Waverly is having none of it. “Date, Nicole!” she barks.

“Thursday?” Nicole asks, panicked into obedience and choosing the noun side of the ambiguity, which is fine. Waverly would have also accepted a _yes,_ but an actual day seems like the faster route forward.

“Thursday is too late,” Waverly tells her. “You meant Tuesday.”

“That’s tonight,” Nicole says. Waverly nods.

“Exactly. I’ll pick you up at eight.”

Nicole waits almost thirty minutes after Waverly spins on her heel and marches back out before texting _pick up where?_ The total lack of capitals sounding very meek. Waverly smiles.

Karma’s a bitch though, and Waverly isn’t smiling by the time she’s standing alone outside Nicole’s front door. Bouquet in her hand, sweaty palm prints smeared down the thighs of her pants. 

She goes on tiptoes when Nicole comes outside. Kissing her on the cheek, and melting some of the panic out of her terrorized date.

They go to Bob’s Big Burger Bash, sitting on the gate of the jeep, eating carnivorously massive burgers and supposedly vegan french fries. They have napkins just like civilized beasts, but Waverly uses her thumb to wipe mustard from Nicole’s cheek, not caring about the cliché. 

Nicole is still under the touch, but catches Waverly’s wrist when she moves away. Eyes dark and watching as she pulls the captured thumb back, biting gently into the ball. Waverly breathes a little ragged, not caring about that cliché, either.

She’s not controlling the pace. There’s no corner of her mind reserved for watching. Making sure she isn’t leading on, or going cold. She just is, here, with Nicole.

Nicole releases the nip, and Waverly kisses her. Proper. Real. Hands tangled in the lapels of Nicole’s shirt, and her tongue invited inside the heat of Nicole’s mouth. The feel of it, the power and the carefree disregard zings straight from her toenails to her crown.

“I’m not exactly straight, I don’t think,” she says, once they break, and Nicole gives a gasping kind of laugh.

“Yeah,” she breathes. “Yeah, I might kind of get that.”

* * *

“This is my legacy,” Waverly tells Nicole on their third date. Sitting on the hood of the jeep, parked inside the lichgate. The electrician _and_ the exterminator have come, plus the roofer and the plumber. The homestead has transformed from an actual hovel, into a rundown shit pile. It’s stunning progress. 

Nicole looks at it, dubious.

“Come on.” Waverly drags them both down off the hood. “I’ll give you the nickel tour.”

Nicole follows willingly, and they stand in the front room with hands still clasped. “Front room,” Waverly says, pointing to where they’re standing. “Parlor. Office. Kitchen.” 

Each room gets a directional finger flick, but Nicole ignores any temptation to follow the movement, eyes locked onto Waverly’s face. Waverly laughs and spins, pulling Nicole up the stairs as something in her stomach clenches. 

“Bedroom,” she says, feeling a growling atmosphere. “Bed.”

“Hmm,” Nicole hums, cut off when Waverly pulls her down for a kiss. Taking her time, being thorough. Pressing all of her weight against Nicole, moving back only when she remembers that they both need air. 

Air that Nicole pulls in hard, her eyes steady and pupils drinking in the light. Drinking in Waverly. It makes her feel bold, and shy, and alive. Nicole runs a thumb across her lips, trails her fingertips in an aching line down her throat, stops at the vee of her shirtfront, touch light against the topmost button. Waiting.

“Off,” Waverly tells her. Nicole smiles, slow and confident. Hands now against Waverly’s collarbones, guiding her backwards towards the bed. Treating Waverly to a type and duration of foreplay she’s never experienced before. Some classic metaphor about journey, instead of destination.

But sincerely, if Nicole does not at least make some sort of progress, Waverly is going to metaphorically actually kill her. She’s not specifically gentle in prodding Nicole onto her back, or in straddling her, or in pressing her palms into Nicole’s shoulders and her face into Nicole’s startled expression.

“Um,” Nicole says.

“You are way, way past the expectation of orgasm line, and if you don’t do something about it real frickin’ soon, I will.”

The soft wonder in Nicole’s eyes shifts to surprise, and Waverly feels her boldness shrinking. “I—” she backtracks, but doesn’t get any farther. Nicole sits up, one hand on Waverly’s hip and the other between her shoulder blades. Flipping them until Nicole’s weight is back on her. One hand gripping Waverly’s wrist above her head, the other a delicious hook, and Nicole’s teeth on her skin. 

“The expectation of orgasm?” Nicole pants, later. Splayed out across the bed’s cardinal directions, delightfully tousled. Waverly curls into her shoulder, and is gathered up against Nicole’s steadying heartbeat.

“Late plateau stage,” Waverly says, contented and calm. “Vasocongestion of the clitoral corpus cavernosal. Significant increase in vaginal and labial tissue oxygen tension. High production of fluid transudate.”

Nicole stares. Waverly grins, and shrugs a little. “Hot and bothered, bordering on _in flagrante_ blue balling.”

“You are legitimately terrifying,” Nicole says. 

“Not that terrifying,” Waverly contradicts, smug, but Nicole is busy pulling her sideways, to lay chest to chest, and hips to hips. Not however, feet to feet.

“Short,” Nicole smiles into their next kiss. 

“Internationally, bang on average,” Waverly protests, and Nicole’s smile gets too wide to actually get any kissing done. Just lips pulled up hard, breathing against Waverly’s mouth. Waverly ducks under the hinge of her jaw, and noses into the hollow of her throat.

“Bang on,” Nicole whispers to herself, honest to god chortling, and it’s the very best part. How much they laugh, and the pauses between. 

She lets her hands wander, waiting to feel incompetent, or lost. It doesn’t seem that mysterious, though. An erection might not be subtle, but the wetness Waverly finds between Nicole’s thighs isn’t subtle, either. The way Nicole’s legs fall wider, the rise of her hips, an unencrypted semaphore of want and request. 

It’s an invitation Waverly isn’t about to ignore. She pushes, frictionless and soft. Nicole makes a delicious little noise as she goes still, and Waverly is inside another person’s body. It’s one of the most audaciously intimate things she’s ever done.

She watches Nicole's face from centimetres away. The glide of her eyes under her eyelids, and the sweep of her eyelashes. Touching Nicole the way she likes to be touched, looking for signs. The steady breath losing rhythm, and the arm that curls around Waverly’s shoulder blades to pull their skin together, and the ratcheting tension building in Nicole’s trembling muscles. 

Trembling, Waverly suddenly realizes, not from any skill or technique she’d worried over lacking. It’s the closeness that’s a tightening wire in Nicole’s muscles. The fact that it’s Waverly’s weight pressing her down, and it’s Waverly’s nose against her cheek, and it’s Waverly’s unconscious hips making their own rhythm against her propped thigh. 

“Don’t stop,” Nicole manages. Overlapping Waverly’s hand to adjust something small, and Waverly doesn’t mind this cliché any more than she’d minded kissing condiments from Nicole’s lips. Because Nicole is arching, mouth open and muscles locked, and Waverly is the one doing that, making that happen.

“Wow,” Waverly whispers, once Nicole is the one gathered into her arms. “Wow. We should do that a lot, a lot more. A lot of a lots.”

Nicole just laughs, and pushes her face into the dip of Waverly’s shoulder.

* * *

“What did you forget?” Waverly calls towards the tentative shuffling noises at the front door, closing the prospective student portal on the computer screen with choppy little clicks. She’d escorted Nicole out the same door fifteen minutes ago, lunch in hand, kiss administered, butt patted. 

“Oh,” the voice trickles down Waverly’s spine, “just a couple little things. Or, just one big one.”

She spins. In the doorway Wynonna wiggles a few tentative fingers. “Hey, sis.”

*  
“The place looks nice.” Wynonna lets her eyes rove around, lofting one of Nicole's night-off longnecks to her mouth. It spasms into Waverly’s already twitching eyelid.

“Are you pregnant, or broke, or just both?”

Wynonna completes a long swallow, and nods. “I deserve that.”

“What’s the answer?” Waverly crosses everything she owns to cross, and glares. Wynonna wilts, but only a little.

“Neither. I missed you.”

“Funny,” Waverly scoffs. “I learned not to miss you.”

“I probably deserve that, too.” Wynonna nods a little more, philosophical.

“That,” Waverly agrees, “and a lot of other things.” Wynonna grimaces, but Waverly only hardens. “How long are you staying.”

“Ummm.” Wynonna’s twitching and rocking on her feet. “Permanently?”

“Yeah.” Waverly can feel the bitterness in her own laugh. “Yeah, okay. Sure.”

Something complicated happens on Wynonna’s face. Waverly fights the pull of it. Being honest in the moment doesn’t mean telling the truth. “This is the place I need to be, Waves. Please.”

“You’ve said please before,” Waverly says softly, looking at the floor.

“I’ve never meant it like this,” Wynonna says, stark enough that Waverly feels the pleading. 

“Broke,” Waverly indicts, but Wynonna shakes her head sharply. “What then?” Waverly demands, and Wynonna slumps, bottle dangling from her fingers, head down.

“I told you. I missed you,” she says, like she doesn’t expect Waverly to believe the words, but doesn’t have anything else.

Once, a long time ago, after Mama had left but before Daddy killed himself and Willa, Wynonna had found one last can of corn. Standing on a precarious chair, butt deep into an upper cabinet and shushing Waverly against interrupting the drunken snoring ringing through the house. 

She’d pried the lid open and given Waverly the first bite, and the spangled burst of food on her tongue felt then exactly the way Wynonna’s hug feels now. The shock of something fundamental, withheld and returned.

“You can sleep in the barn,” she mutters into Wynonna’s shoulder. “I turned your bedroom into a parlor.”

“Yeah, okay.” Wynonna’s voice is both a sound in her ears, and a vibration inside her ribs. “Firm, but fair.”

*  
“How much have the old biddies told you?”

Nicole blinks through the open door, light pouring into the night, and slightly disheveled.

“About me,” Waverly tries to clarify. Realizing maybe showing up at midnight wasn’t the smartest. “About my family. What has this town told you?”

Nicole licks her lips, cautious. “Maybe you should come in?”

Waverly allows herself to be taken inside and nested on the couch. A blanket curled around her, and a hot mug put into her hands. “No popcorn?” she jokes, weakly.

“There are times in life even popcorn can’t surmount,” Nicole tells her far too gravely, her wink only a sketch. Folding to sit cross legged and sideways on her end of the couch. Pressing a toe into the blanket lump that corresponds to Waverly’s knee.

“I know your mother left when you weren’t even knee high, and that your Daddy flipped his car when you weren’t much older, and that Gus and Curtis took you in.

“They aren’t my parents, but I’m still their kid,” Waverly murmers, and waves off Nicole’s faintly narrowed eyes. “They meant it good, not bad.” Nicole settles, and Waverly redirects. “What else do you know?”

Nicole pauses, groping for delicacy, but it’s not necessary. “Willa,” Waverly prompts.

“Killed, in the car.”

“And,” Waverly draws it out a little, putting it off. “Wynonna?”

“Less clear, per the gossip,” Nicole admits. “Wild child. Bad blood. Ran off a couple times, current location unknown.”

“Well, I’m happy to report that she’s alive, and back, and in my barn.” Waverly laughs, because it’s kind of funny. Then she stops, because it’s not at all funny.

“Baby,” Nicole murmurs, pulling gently until she’s leaning inside a circle of arms, being rocked. Waverly tells herself she’ll allow five minutes, and wakes up to Nicole walking them both into her dark and cool bedroom.

*  
“Pancakes!” Waverly barks into the door she’s just kicked open, in exactly the tone an excitable person would use to warn of roaring flames and imminent death. Transforming the straw bale bed into hands, and feet, and flailing alarm. Waverly watches, and smiles.

Eventually, her target gathers enough wherewithal to glare. “Jesus bearded Christ. Was that fucking necessary?”

“Yes.”

“Well,” Wynonna pauses, and gives up the hunt for a rejoinder. “Did you say pancakes?” 

“Five minutes, or I throw them away.”

She turns to the sound of Wynonna scrabbling for her pants.

“Thank you,” Wynonna says, once she’s finished silently eating pancakes drenched in the good syrup. Waverly shrugs. Wynonna’s smile goes a little stale, fingers nervously jingling keys to the beater parked out in the lichyard.

“Where are you going?” Too high, too fast. Waverly clears her throat.

“Town,” Wynonna pauses, considering. “Gus, if I’ve got the balls. Job hunt, even if I don’t have the balls.”

Inside Waverly’s chest, something pulses, faint and warm. She twists away from it. Jobs aren’t actual tethers. _Hope_ and _Wynonna_ are not synonyms.

*  
In the end, Wynonna doesn’t have to test the mettle of her metaphorical balls, because the Mountain hears the news on the party line, and comes to Mohammed.

“Irish?” Waverly hovers a hand over Gus’ coffee. “Highly recommended.”

“So, are you broke,” Gus asks, seated at the homestead’s round dining room table, yanking her cup back from the tipped bottle of Bailey’s, “or just pregnant?”

“Fuck sake,” Wynonna rolls her eyes, slouched down with her arms crossed, but Waverly slaps the table with the flat of her hand, victorious.

“Thank you!”

“Neither,” Wynonna repeats. “I came, I wanted—” Her eyes slide over towards Waverly. Gus follows the movement, and sighs. Leaning across to kiss the prodigal cheek.

“Welcome home, Wynonna. Don’t screw it up.”

“Trying my best,” Wynonna reassures, and that thing in Waverly’s chest twists again. “But hey, since we’re judging, should we talk about who put that hickey on Waverly’s neck?”

“Huh,” Gus snorts flatly, turning to inspect. In the space between them, sheltered from Wynonnna, she winks.

“Mind your business, Wynonna,” is the verdict.

“Why does she get to be the favourite,” Wynonna gripes, and Gus turns away before Waverly can do much beyond look surprised.

“I love you both the same,” Gus says, like a skip in a record. “Just not very much,” they all chorus together, harmonizing in radically different tones that make being an Earp suddenly feel warm and safe.

* * *

It lasts six days.

On the seventh, Waverly stands out on the porch in socks and flapping laces, looking at a patch of grass remarkable only for its lack of broke-down and leaking truck.

The dim light of her phone screen says it’s just past 8p.m. Early yet, and seven early nights in a row is a lot to ask of Wynonna Earp. 

Waverly’s fingers hover over the text keyboard, composing _where are you?_ for the tenth time, before deleting it and clicking the phone locked.

Seven days of leaving her passport at home is also a lot to ask of Wynonna Earp.

She goes inside, pours whiskey into tea, and thumbs her phone screen to life every fifteen seconds. Playing behind her eyes is a handy loop of Wynonna gone, versus Wynonna missing, versus Wynonna lifeless in a crumpled car.

She sinks into a grey stupor that isn’t sleep and isn’t consciousness, phone stuffed under the throw pillow directly below her ear. Volume turned up, just in case. When it rings, it shoots her heartbeat straight into the roof of her mouth.

“Come get your sister,” Sheriff Nedley speaks through a phone Waverly’s already pinched against her shoulder. Hopping on one foot to get a sock, and then a boot on.

“Fucking bullshit,” she tells the Jeep. Roaring it to life, and stomping the accelerator down the dark road. “Fucking moron,” she adds, and the car very kindly doesn’t ask if she meant Wynonna, or just herself.

“Waverly,” Nicole shoots up from her desk when Waverly presents herself at the front counter. Waving Ms. Linda, who has not stood up from her place at the duty desk where she is resolutely reading a Harlequin romance paperback, back down. “I’ve got this.”

“Sure,” Ms. Linda agrees, rotating up a look, then snorting and dropping back down to her book.

“Well?” Waverly asks, as soon as they’re out of earshot.

“Drunk,” Nicole summarizes gleefully. “Drunk like woah, while outside of a dwelling house. Causing a disturbance. Specifically: screaming, shouting, swearing, and singing loudly, all while using insulting language.”

Waverly smiles, a little. “So she hit all the highlights pursuant to Section 175 of the Criminal Code of Canada.”

Nicole leans a shoulder against the wall, the paddle mic on her epaulette clacking once. “I like it when a girl quotes Summary Offences to me.” 

“I should leave her here overnight,” Waverly says, knowing she won’t. Faintly, through two doors, Wynonna is singing. Nicole’s smile gets a little bigger.

“I could come make sure you’re safe, in that big house all alone.”

For a long second, Waverly feels herself agreeing. Then she shakes her head. “No. She’s mine. But she’s back to sleeping in the barn.”

“She graduated from the barn?” Nicole looks surprised. Waverly shrugs.

“I let her on the couch for good behaviour two nights ago.”

“Easy come, easy go.” Nicole’s eyes have tiny wrinkles around them when she fully commits to that easy and dimpled smile. Waverly hooks a finger into the vee of her blouse. Holding, without pulling.

“I’m sorry,” she tells Nicole’s shirt buttons, uncertain all over again if she’s apologizing for whatever trouble Wynonna has caused, or if it’s just for whatever trouble she has caused.

“Baby,” Nicole says, low and leaning in.

“Shouldn’t you be mad at me?” Maybe asking like this is speaking the devil's name, but not knowing how apologetic Nicole needs her to be is grating down her nerves.

“Reprobates are reprobates. The hot younger sisters of reprobates are just hot younger sisters.” Nicole says from centimetres away. “Okay?”

“Yeah,” Waverly whispers back, feeling the coil in her spine relaxing. “Yeah, okay.”

“Okay,” Nicole repeats, resolute, then squares Waverly’s shoulders between her hands, holding her at arm's length. “You ready?”

Something that sounds like a cross between _Oh! Canada,_ and bear wrassling floats down the hall. Waverly makes a soulful and pleading face, but Nicole just shakes her head firmly.

“Oh no. This one is your’s, babe.”

*  
“Pancakes?” Wynonna’s slouched at the kitchen table, the afternoon sun blazing into her hair. 

Blazing, Waverly sincerely hopes, straight into her skull.

“Not on your life,” Wavery says, rattling the mixing bowl with malice, earning a satisfying wince.

“The barn is cold,” Wynonna moans, holding her head. “And you’re fucking loud.” 

“Yeah well.” Waverly is without sympathy. “Should’ve thought of that before you got arrested.”

“Detained,” Wynonna corrects. “And don’t pretend my poor choices somehow negate that new hickey of yours. Gonna tell me where that came from?”

“No,” Waverly says, cracking an egg into the mound of dry ingredients. “Where’s your passport?”

“I took it for renewal, just like a real adult.” Wynonna sprawls back down onto the table. “It’s so bright. Please tell me you’re not fucking Champ Hardy again.”

“Well, it’s daytime, so that does happen,” Waverly tell her, the biting thing that’s been living behind her ribs curling up, tail over nose. “And: ask me no questions, I’ll tell you no lies.”

“Champ Hardy is beneath you.”

Waverly decides she might actually let Wynonna eat a couple pancakes.

*  
“That Earp girl is back,” Waverly hears from between the cereal boxes. “The mentally troubled one. Can’t remember her name. They’re all with those ridiculous double-ues. Can’t hardly tell them apart.” 

Old voices, talking loud enough to push gossip into old ears, making it through the double layer of stacked comestibles that separates the cereal aisle from the cookie aisle. Waverly freezes, ice in her spine.

“The youngest one is sweet,” a second voice says, but there’s a contradictory sniff.

“Stupid is,” the first voice shoots back. “Maybe she isn’t trouble, but she’ll carry on with that rodeo boy, and whelp out a few bastards, and make a whole new generation without any manners.”

Waverly decides she probably doesn’t need cereal today. 

There’s nothing to put away, but she stands in the kitchen anyway. Gus’ money is almost gone, and the homestead still looks full of dingy old ghosts. She turns on a heel, and slams the door behind herself.

*  
Nicole comes home, shedding coat and boots. Standing behind her at the counter, hunching down a little to fit them together. Sweeping Waverly’s hair over her shoulder, pressing lips into her neck.

Waverly leans back, humming.

“Hi baby,” Nicole whispers, the tips of her fingers sliding just under the waistband of Waverly’s pants.

“Someone’s riled.” Waverly twists in the embrace, and Nicole kisses her dirty. Tongue sliding and teeth nipping, and her hands already under Waverly’s shirt. “Did arresting people get you all hot and bothered?” 

“Baby, arresting people is either boring, annoying, or just terrifying. It’s never sexy.”

“Not ever?” Waverly creeps her fingers down the buttons of Nicole’s uniform blouse, towards the double tongue of her duty belt.

“Well,” Nicole admits, trapping Waverly’s hand flat against her sternum. “Sometimes it’s just good, clean fun.”

“Hm,” Waverly says, speculatively. Nicole’s eyes are fast on her face, trying to find where she’s leading, and if Nicole wants to follow. Treading the edges of what they know about each other. 

Gently, she turns her hand until she’s clasping Nicole’s, leading her upstairs. Letting her click through the combo on the gun safe. Making her stand as she unclips the duty belt keepers, pulling the lower belt from its loops with a heavy sound.

“Waverly,” Nicole says, almost uncertain, but Waverly just unbuttons her blouse, going on tiptoes to kiss her.

“Mine,” she lays claim, and Nicole’s _yes_ is more breath than sound. Hands slide up her back to pull her close, and when she bounces on the balls of her feet, Nicole catches her and hoists her up far enough to wrap her legs around her waist.

“Strong,” Waverly says against her mouth, and Nicole pulls her a little tighter, giving her friction. But on the bed, Waverly twists out of the grip, and turns Nicole onto her back. 

It feels good. Coaxing her lover gentle with one finger. Workmanlike with two. The third on request, and not long until her clenched and shuddering orgasm. The tendons in her neck standing out, and one hand twisted into the sheets.

That feels good, too. The squeeze and pulse of living flesh around her fingers. She rests against Nicole’s chest, fingers still inside, and it is the very best good. Being held so tight and trusted so close.

“Do you want babies?” she asks once they’re under the blankets. Curled like a comma onto a pale and lightly freckled shoulder. Wanting the glow of connection to stay bright.

“Maybe,” Nicole says, idly stroking the arch of a foot against one of Waverly’s calves. “Maybe someday, but I’d rather be Sheriff.”

Waverly cranes up, looking. “You can’t have both?”

“No reason I can’t. It’s just that I definitely know I want one.” Nicole frowns a little, looking into the unknown future. 

“Here, in Purgatory?” Waverly thinks about Randy Nedley pulling Chrissy away at the charity ball, to do her duty as Sheriff’s daughter. How the hard line of Mayor Loblaw’s jowls had softened under Chrissy’s hand on her arm. Leaning in and cutting her eyes conspiratorially towards her father, who obediently harrumphed through his moustache. The entire Nedley family, reduced but still strong, adapted to life under the thumb of Purgatorian politics.

“That’s the ten year plan,” Nicole says, shaking out of some small reverie to grin wide. “Purgatory won’t know what hit it.”

“No,” Waverly agrees faintly. Seeing in her mind the hard glint in the Mayor’s eyes when something new comes around. What Bunny Loblaw does when that _something_ doesn’t reflect Bunny Loblaw straight back to herself. How much harder Nicole will have to work, even without an Earp anchor.

She throws off the blanket, rising to straddle Nicole’s hips, and look down into her face. Nicole looks back, eyes dark and eager. “Enough talking,” she rules, leaning down for a kiss. Nicole makes no objections.

*  
Wynonna is sitting at the table when Waverly comes slamming through the door. Kicking the chair opposite her out, to skid across the floor.

“Sit.”

“Dramatic,” Waverly notes, sitting.

“Exhibit A: where have you been for two whole fucking days?”

“You get to disappear, I get to disappear,” Waverly chirps lightly, tone guaranteed to annoy. She’s not ashamed of Nicole. It’s not even a real secret. Gus almost certainly knows, and Chrissy’s never not known. It’s just that finding out a whole new thing about yourself is big. She’s barely even found the corners and edges, let alone had to explain. “Besides, that’s just a question, not an exhibit. And this isn’t a trial. It is, at the very best, a deposition, and even that is stretching things.”

Wynonna looks suspiciously confused for a long three-count, then waves it away. “Moving onto Exhibit B: what is this?” She holds up the _tuition!_ envelope.

“Nothing!” Waverly snatches it away.

“Okay, Little Miss Overreaction, very convincing.” Wynonna laughs. Waverly stands up, putting the laughter at her back when she walks away, slamming the door of her room against it.

Wynonna tries again, hours later. Pensive and leaning on the door jamb to Waverly’s room. “Do you want to go to college, Waves? I’m sorry I was an asshole about it. I have some saved. We could—”

“No,” Waverly says through her teeth.

“So, what’s the envelope, then?”

“Nothing,” Waverly insists, stony. “Just something I used to think about.” 

Wynonna shifts between feet. “Baby girl. You’re the best of us. If you want to go to college, we can figure it out.”

“It’s too late,” Waverly says, unyielding. “I’m already an Earp. There’s no changing it.”

* * *

Waverly ambushes Nicole in her own kitchen. Sun streaming through the windows. “I came here to tell you that we’re breaking up.”

Nicole frowns. “We are?”

“No,” Waverly says. “I changed my mind.”

“O-kay. Well. This is new. Do I get to know why we almost broke up?” 

“You’re too good for me.”

“Oh, yes.” Nicole snorts. “All public servants are much too good for mere civilians.”

“I’m serious,” Waverly snaps.

“Serious,” Nicole agrees. Lounging back against the counter with her stupid long legs, and the way she’s wearing clothes. The fucking audacity. Waverly huffs.

“Well, why?” Nicole finally prompts, breaking Waverly’s first class brood.

“You’ve been to college. You have a career. You’re tall, and hot, and sexily competent. I’m just a bartender. There’s an obvious difference in quality.”

Nicole frowns more gently. “You’re a bartender now, and you can keep being a bartender later, if you want. Or you can be something else. But you’re not _just_ anything.” 

“Stop being nice to me.”

Nicole rolls her eyes, exasperated. “I’ll do whatever I want. And what I want is to be nice to you.”

“You shouldn’t want to.” Waverly’s losing the upper hand, and she knows it.

“Baby,” Nicole says, firmly reasonable as a kindergarten teacher, and if she’s going to be that way, then Waverly’s going to lay down some adult truths. She rolls right over whatever Nicole was about to say.

“I’m trash, Nicole. This town knows it, and you aren’t stupid. Once the lust hormones, or whatever wear off, you’re going to know it too. I’m just saving everyone some time.”

“Waverly,” Nicole murmurs, but she turns her head away, fighting the pull towards Nicole’s embrace. Wrapping a hand into her shirtfront to fend her off.

“I like you, Nicole Haught. I like you so much,” she says, too low in her throat to be anything but the truth.

“So,” Nicole presses forward, until Waverly’s elbow bends. Crowding them so close the humidity of their outward breaths is trapped. “You’re preemptively breaking up with me because you like me so much?” 

“You can’t be Sheriff and be with me,” Waverly tells her. Feeling the absolute truth of it deflate out of her. Sink her down, like helium out of a balloon. “The mayor, and the council, and the voters.”

“Oh, that.” Nicole flaps a hand. “Fuck ‘em.”

Waverly’s head comes up so sharply, she almost clocks Nicole in the chin. Her probably-still-girlfriend smiles down. It’s one of the new ones, hinting at something that’s still on colt legs, wobbly and blinking at the new world. 

“Fuck,” she says slowly, “them?”

“Yup. Fuck ‘em. Right in the touchhole.” Nicole’s grin is mostly bared teeth, like she might relish what’s to come. “Because I’m the law, babe, and heroes always win.”

“Huh,” Waverly says.

“Are you done breaking up with me for my own good?” Nicole asks, and Waverly presses her forehead into her chest. Feeling her heartbeat, and not even thinking of clichés.

“Is it really that easy?” She asks the non-existent hollow between their bodies.

“Not easy,” Nicole clarifies. “Just simple. And always, always worth it.”

Pressed against her, Nicole feels vital. Warm and breathing, pulsing with a big four chambered heart that seems to beat with something Waverly is only starting to realize beats inside her, too.

It’s still hard to believe, though, because Hope was supposed to be Pandora’s last captive.

* * *

There’s only one more hurdle. So Waverly sets up another kitchen ambush. 

The homestead is far more ramshackle than Nicole’s house. Full of memories, and ghosts, and imperfect things. She kicks the chair out.

“Sit.”

“Dramatic,” Wynonna teases, but it cracks from sudden nerves. When she sits, it’s on the edge of the chair.

“Do you want to graduate from the couch?” Waverly asks over her folded hands, and a whole new expression bleeds into Wynonna’s face.

“With every ounce of my aching sacroiliac,” she says, arching back with a wince. “Plus my shoulders, hips, and mostly my ass.” 

“Your sacroiliac is your ass, Wynonna,” Waverly tells her, to the accompaniment of eye rolling. “We can turn the side room into a bedroom. Use the old bedstead, and get a new mattress. Get some bedroom furniture at the upcycle store.”

“Okay,” Wynonna says, cautious as a dog who’s learned offering hands can also grab, but Waverly isn’t done.

“I’m going to apply for online programs, and you’re going to keep nearly reasonable hours, and contribute to the grocery bill, and not get arrested. Clockwork, once a week, we’ll have supper at Gus’. Chore roster once a month. Do you agree to these terms?”

Wynonna bites her lip, and the thing inside Waverly that knows it’s all mostly bluff tenses. Then Wynonna’s breathing wavers and her eyes haze with tears.

“Any room for negotiation?” She pushes it past an obviously choked throat, and Waverly just looks back, fond. Heaven forfend Wynonna just admit she wants nothing more than supper at Gus’. 

“Absolutely none.” Waverly grins, and the haze in Wynonna’s eyes becomes actual tears.

“Fuck,” Wynonna sniffs. “Quick, tell me something disgusting. Tell me about how you’re fucking Champ Hardy.”

Waverly feels her courage rise up hard against her teeth, but it crests just short of event horizon. Leaving her with indrawn breath and open mouth, but no confession. 

“It’s okay, Waves.” Wynonna smile is surprisingly gentle. “Whoever she is, you can work your way up to the words.” Waverly feels it blaze into her cheeks. Almost panic and almost relief, but not fully either. Wynonna’s never given her any reason to be afraid, but she is. 

“How?”

“I sto…uh, liberated your entire condom supply weeks ago,” Wynonna explains, nonchalant. “You’re not on the pill, let alone anything more exotic, and you’re definitely getting laid. Ergo.”

Waverly squawks shrill outrage, and Wynonna rolls her eyes. “Don’t focus on the liberation. Focus on how there’s nothing you could ever tell me that could make me love you any less.”

“Um,” Waverly’s voice edges forward cautiously. Wynonna goes slit eyed, but she’s in emotional checkmate, and without recourse. “She’s a cop,” Waverly blurts, fingers twisting against each other. Wynonna closes her eyes, dragging in a deep breath, trickling it back out slowly.

“That’s fine, too,” she says, hardly at all warped from gritting her teeth. Waverly flings herself into Wynonna’s arms, crushing both their ribs against the table, making her sister woof out all her air. “You’re going to love her.”

“Sure,” Wynonna agrees, wheezing only just a little. “Of course I will, baby girl. She’s yours, and I love everything about you.”

“Yes,” Waverly enthuses. “True fact. Which means you won’t mind the part where she arrested you, or the part where she stole your gun.”

Wynonna’s own squawk sounds exactly like everything Waverly’s ever wanted.

**Author's Note:**

> That’s it. Keep cool, internet friends. If you find yourself adrift in a life raft, remember that fish eyeballs are an often overlooked source of liquid.
> 
> This wouldn’t be a shadow of what it became without @LuckyWantsToKnow. There might be a wise woman behind every man, but the real saying should be there’s a beta extraordinaire behind every whiny authour.
> 
> 40º 41.35487’N, 074º 02.67012’W (approx.)


End file.
